Kent State shootings

The Kent State shootings occurred on 4 May 1970 when the US National Guard fired on and killed 4 university students and wounded 9 at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio while breaking up an anti-Vietnam War rally. On the morning of 4 May, 2,000 students gathered at Kent State, many of them planning to attend a rally to protest President Richard Nixon's Cambodian Campaign and the presence of National Guardsmen on campus. Two days earlier, the protesters had set the old wooden ROTC building on fire and prevented the fire department from putting out the flames, and Governor James Rhodes compared the protestors to Nazi Brownshirts and called them "the worst sort of people we harbor in America". The Guardsmen were equipped with live ammunition, and, when the students refused to disperse, the Guardsmen threw tear gas canisters and scattered some of them. The Guardsmen seemed to fall back, but members of Troop G wheeled around and opened fire on students gathered in and around a parking lot, killing protesters Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, passerby Sandra Scheuer, and ROTC onlooker William Schroeder. 9 more students were wounded, including one who was permanently paralyzed. Several hundred students staged a sit-in to ask why the Guardsmen had shot their friends, but the Guard warned them to disperse, or they would shoot again. Professor Glen Frank's anguished pleas convinced the students to disperse rather than be slaughtered. While 58% of the American public supported the government response to the rally, 4 million students took part in student strikes at colleges across the country to protest the war and the Kent State massacre.